COINS

COINS – the combined information system – is a large database and information management system at the heart of the UK's HM Treasury. The Treasury is the government department responsible for managing, among other things, the spending of all UK government ministries and related bodies. Following new transparency guidelines, the Treasury have released snapshots of COINS as public data, giving an insight into the state of government finances. Both committed spending and future plans are included in the COINS data release.

One problem with the COINS data release is the sheer scale of the data. While the COINS data represents only rolled-up spending and budget items, not individual transactions, it nevertheless contains millions of rows of data. Too much, in fact, to be able to load the data into commonly available spreadsheet tools such as Excel or OpenOffice. This limits the ability of ordinary citizens to explore and inspect the data for themselves.

Working with the UK Linked Data Kernel project under the leadership and guidance of John Sheridan (The National Archives), we translated the Treasury's release of COINS into linked-data. It is now available from a public SPARQL end-point, making this important government dataset amenable to exploration with linked-data tools.

Technical details of the representation of COINS as linked data are available from this blog posting.